MURDER AND POPULARITY IN THE UNITED STATES.

Evening Star, Volume VII, Issue 1972, 31 August 1869, Page 3

MURDER AND POPULARITY IN THE UNITED STATES.

A murder trial, which has just taken place in Maryland, illustrates in a sticking manner the truth that in America there is something much stronger than law, and which overrides and sets aside law at its goodwill and pleasure. When a young lady, in the perfect and undisputed possession of her senses, walks up to a man sitting in an hotel and empties the contents of a revolver into his body, continuing to riddle him with balls after he has fallen dead at her feet, the law provides that the young lady shall be hung. But in Maryland, and for that matter in nearly all the other States of the Union, they manage these things after a fashion of their own. Near the city of Baltimore there resides a highly respectable and well-to-do family, named Cairns, one member of which is an unmarried daughter. Miss Martha Cairns has reached the age of twenty-eight years—an age when a young lady may not unreasonably be supposed to know what she is about —when she fell in love with Mr M‘Comas, a gentleman some few years her senior. The wooing proceeded well—the wedding-day yas appointed, and the trousseau was prepared ; but the lover failed to come to time, and soon afterwards Miss Cairns became the mother of a child, for whose existence M'Comas admitted himself to be responsible. Negotiations took place between him and Miss Cairns’s family ; but although “ he always spoke in the highest terms of tlie girl, and said she was a lady,” he refused to marry her, asserting that he had never agreed to do so. He was warned to leave the neighborhood, “ as the girl stood high, and the thing would not die out.” He disregarded the warning; and on the 10th of last month, while he was sitting in a hotel with some of his friends, Miss Cairns rode up, accompanied by her brother, dismounted, inquired for M'Comas, walked up to him, and, levelling a revolver which she held in her hand, shot him through the heart. He fell to the floor; but Miss Cairns exclaimed, “ Gentlemen, you all know what it is done for,” fired three other bullets into him, and then calmly left the hotel, mounted her steed, and returned home. She surrendered herself to the authorities the next day, and last week she was tried. Of course, as her offence was not bailable, she must have spent the intervening tiiqe in jail, had not “ the moral strength of the sympathy of the people for the unfortunate young woman ” been so vividly displayed that the jailor was apprised that if he “ incarcerated her as a felon” the jail would be torn down. “ The county jail, occupied chiefly by negro thieves, and containing some few white culprits of the lowest riff-raff, was not considered the proper place for a lady.” So she was provided “ with more becoming accommodation,” and “ was quartered accordingly at Glenn’s Hotel,” where, it is pleasant to know, “ she received her friends and relatives at pleasure, and appeared, unostentatiously, at the public tables.” With such a prelude, the conclusion of the farce was not at all doubtful. The

“ trial ” resulted in a verdict of acquittal ; and in order that nothing might be lacking to manifest the popular sympathy after the verdict, she “ held quite a levee at her hotel, visitors of both sexes constantly coming and going, and almost all proffering encouragement; and at night “ she was serenaded, as was also the jury. It is not surprising that the murderess was “in fine spirits /’ but it is to be regretted that nothing is told of the state of mind in which the widowed mother and brothcrless sisters of her victim received these ovations to the woman who had deprived them of their only earthly support.